I’ve always been rather fond of Stephen Crane’s poetry, most especially “A Man Said to the Universe,” “I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon,” “In The Desert,” and “Should the Wide World Roll Away.” There is something in each of them that really encapsulates my world view to some degree, and of all of his poems they’re the ones I come back to again and again. Perhaps it is how succint they are – I do like my poetry to be shorter.

I’m also fond of a few of ee cummings love poems, specifically “since feeling is first” – and I would be remiss to not mention Emily Dickinson, since my overuse of dashes is entirely her fault. Shel Silverstein is fun to read in general, but I keep Masks on my phone as a reminder to always shamelessly be myself.

Even some of the cheesy instagram poetry hits just right at times, most especially a particular one by Beau Taplin.

Well, the month of April is also National Poetry Month. The friend that I did the 2023 Writing Challenge with is going to join me in another, much shorter challenge – we’re going to write a poem for every day of April.

The rules are as follows for the 2024 April Poetry Challenge:

1. We must complete 1 poem daily, on that day, and post it to our blogs.
2. Because life happens, we may build up a lee-way of 3 poems before April to use if we cannot update that day.
3. Every effort should be made to write a poem that day, and the lee-way poems are only a last minute back up if that cannot be done.

So starting April 1st and going until April 30th, we’ll see how we do with daily poetry updates! If we do create any lee-way poetry as a buffer, we will post those after the 30th. This also coincides with the ends of our 2023 Writing Challenge stories, and give us a break from thinking about those before we settle into rewrites.